


The One in Black

by TempleCloud



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Irregular Webcomic, La Divina Commedia | The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri
Genre: Afterlife, Canonical Character Death, Everyone is Dead, Gen, Severus Snape-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:01:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24524269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TempleCloud/pseuds/TempleCloud
Comments: 5
Kudos: 18





	1. Chapter 1

He had been kept busy throughout the battle at Hogwarts. He knew that neither side liked him. People feared him – they always had. Tall, pale and skeletal, he was always going to look like everyone's idea of a villain. His Goth fashion sense didn't help, but after all, even if he _didn't_ dress in black, it would hardly make him look cuddly and inviting. All right, when it had been absolutely essential, he had taken over the job of the twinkly-eyed, white-bearded old man, even if most people thought the substitution was grotesque. He'd done the job as well as he could under the circumstances. After all, the children had needed him to keep some kind of continuity going, even if most of them were odious little brats.

People thought of him as a murderer, he knew. Just because, when Dumbledore had been mortally ill and dying, he had been _there_ to free the man's soul from the wreckage of his body – and do it before young Draco Malfoy could become an actual murderer, too. Dumbledore had understood, had been ready to go. But Dumbledore wasn't around to tell anyone.

And even the few people who didn't regard him as evil didn't really know him. They didn't know about his habit of adopting unwanted kittens when people tried to drown them. They didn't know about the summer he had spent working on a farm, and the woman he had met then. They didn't know about his granddaughter, who managed to fit into the Muggle world by being an infants' school teacher, since parents never paid any attention when five-year-olds informed them that Miss could do magic.

Still, there was no time to brood on that now. Death stepped through the wall of the Shrieking Shack, to where his next client was lying on the floor, blood pouring from the bite-wound in his throat. Witches and wizards could see Death if they were paying attention, but the dying wizard was preoccupied with trying to get a final message across to the three teenagers surrounding him, and they in turn were focusing on him. One of the boys, Death noted, had a lifetimer that was due to run out in an hour.

The dying man was too badly injured to speak much, but managed to pour an assortment of memories from his brain into the flask that the dark-haired boy held out for him. Death waited for him to finish before swinging his scythe to put an end to the pain.

WELL DONE, SEVERUS, he said, as the man's spirit sat up from his body, massaging its ghostly neck. IT WAS A TOUGH JOB, BUT SOMEONE HAD TO DO IT.


	2. Chapter 2

‘And now I have to head off to the ninth ring of Hell, I suppose,’ said the wizard. ‘The frozen lake.’

DO YOU? asked Death. WHY?

‘Because that’s where traitors belong,’ said the wizard. ‘According to the legend, traitors to their party are buried in ice up to their heads, and traitors to their lords or benefactors are fully encased in ice _and_ get chewed up by Satan. I don’t know what the traditional punishment is for double agents who betrayed _both_ sides, but I expect I’ll find out shortly.’

I SEE. Death was not an expert on the afterlife. In the past, he had generally assumed that people went to whatever eternity they were expecting, or thought they deserved. But, the more people he met, the more he wondered how that could work. It wasn’t as though people got what they expected when they were alive, after all. Most of them hadn’t been expecting to die when they did, for a start.

But they wrote stories, all the same…

YOU ARE BASING YOUR VIEW OF THE AFTERLIFE ON A FANTASY NOVEL YOU READ AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-TWO?

‘Well?’ Severus snapped defensively. He was aware that, put like that, it sounded pretty stupid, and that if there was one thing worse than being called a coward, it was being called stupid. But – well, it wasn’t as if fantasy fiction was any _less_ likely to be right than tracts handed out by people claiming to have the divinely ordained answers. And in the time after Lily’s death, after he’d been released from Azkaban, but before the autumn term had started and he could take up his new job, he had spent much of his time reading obsessively – wizard books; Muggle books bought from the Oxfam shop or borrowed from the council library; fiction or alleged fact. And one day, he had come across the story of a man, lost in a dark forest, who meets a ghost bringing a message from his lost love that she isn’t happy about the way he’s been wasting his life since she died and was no longer there to be a good influence on him…

He’d read it with barely a pause. And bought the two sequels. And kept them in his room to re-read again and again, because there are some books that seize your imagination so hard that you don’t want to let go of them. As time went on, he had come to identify less with the hero, escaping Hell and climbing a mountain on the far side of the world to be reunited with the heroine, and more with the old ghost who had been assigned the task of being the hero’s teacher and protector until they reached the gates of Heaven. Admittedly, the ghostly mentor had a much easier task than Severus and the other teachers at Hogwarts – he might have to fight demons and hell-hounds, negotiate rides on the backs of centaurs and wyverns, and risk meeting fans who might recognise him and ask for his autograph, but at least he had only _one_ pupil, who liked and respected him, even loved him, and was keen to learn, instead of classes of dozens of lazy, insolent, ham-handed teenagers. But even so – when he had been a loyal friend to the hero all this time, and walked through _fire_ with him (which was evidently painful even for ghosts, in the story), and then been allowed a brief sight of Heaven before having to return to Hell because the story didn’t need him any more and he wasn’t the sort of person happy endings happened to, ever…

Well, life wasn’t fair, so why should stories have to be?

HUMANS DO NOT ALWAYS BELIEVE WHAT THEY THINK THEY BELIEVE, Death mused. YOU KNOW THAT LIFE IS NOT FAIR, AND THAT DEATH IS NOT FAIR, BUT DEEP DOWN, YOU FEEL THAT WHAT COMES AFTER DEATH _SHOULD_ BE FAIR. AND YOU DO NOT BELIEVE THAT ‘FAIR’ MEANS INFLICTING ETERNAL TORTURE ON EVERYONE WHO FALLS SHORT OF PERFECTION. YOU ARE A TEACHER, AFTER ALL. YOU KNOW THAT THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GIVING A PUPIL DETENTION FOR WILFUL MISBEHAVIOUR, AND EXPELLING ANYONE WHO FAILS TO SCORE 100% ON EVERY TEST.

‘I never wanted to be a teacher in the first place! I only took this job because, because there was someone I had to protect, except that it turned out that it was all a lie and we were just keeping him to die at the right moment “For The Greater Good,” and, and he said I was disgusting, Dumbledore I mean, and he was _right_ , and I, I wanted to learn how to be a decent person.’

Severus was aware that if he had been alive, he would have been mortified at the sound of his voice babbling away as if it had been marinated in Veritaserum. But at this stage, there was no point trying to be calm and dignified and sinister. You _couldn’t_ out-sinister Death. It would be like a blue-tit fluffing itself up to try to make itself look bigger than a cat.

Death thought that it was like the year he’d put in a shift as – someone else. Except that at least, if you were dressed in a red coat and cotton-wool beard and you sat children down on your knee and asked, HAVE YOU BEEN A GOOD BOY/GIRL/INDETERMINATE THIS YEAR? they knew enough to lie if they wanted to get any presents. Dealing with an adult who had been _required_ to lie and pretend to be a much worse person than he really was, for years and years, and who was relieved that it was all over and now he could say exactly what he thought, however incriminating it was, was much harder.

And, of course, there had been some children who weren’t destined to get any presents, and certainly weren’t destined to have any future…

DO YOU STILL WISH TO BE GOOD? Death asked.

‘Yes!’

THEN I DO NOT THINK HELL WOULD ACCEPT YOU. I THINK YOU KNOW WHERE YOU BELONG.

*******

Death had several more appointments, but it wasn’t too long before there was a lull. He was not, strictly speaking, _the_ Death, but only _a_ Death. His full job title was Death by Narrative Imperative, and this meant that he was responsible for all those deaths which were important enough to a story to be worth describing. Which wasn’t to say that all of them were key to the plot. He was just as likely to have to attend personally on the death of someone’s pet owl, or of a random Muggle who had been unlucky enough to walk into Lord Voldemort. But they were described because the author had a reason to include them.

If the author had time, even walk-on characters might be given enough backstory for readers to understand that the old Muggle gardener was not only a lonely, misunderstood man whose life had been ruined by being framed for murder, but also a brave man who had gone forward to confront the villains, and to care about his death. But even when there wasn’t time for that, even if there was merely a radio report that a family of five had been murdered, Death’s library contained five books, one to tell the life story of each of them.

He wasn’t overworked compared to most of his colleagues, he knew. Most of the ‘Giant Frog’ deaths (sat on by, choking on, poisoned by licking, etc) had been rationalised into Death by Giant Frog, who now had a very busy schedule indeed – _extremely_ busy, when you remembered that most of his clients were flies, from whose point of view _all_ frogs were giants.

Nevertheless, Death by Narrative Imperative had a busy shift tonight. When it was finished, he reported back to the Head Death, who was seated, as always, at his desk on the Infinite Featureless Plain of Death. Well, Featureless apart from the Head Death’s desk, obviously. And a phone. And sometimes it had a door and walls. And the original slippery wood flooring had been replaced with something decently grey and a bit easier for feet to grip on. But – it was pretty bare, all the same.

 _YOU HAVE COMPLETED YOUR ASSIGNMENT?_ asked the Head Death. (He would have been speaking in a different colour speech bubble, if this site had colours. Or a larger font size, if it had different sizes. But on this site, even small caps don’t show up. Frankly, you’re lucky if you can get the italics to work.)

YES, LORD.

 _I COULDN’T HELP NOTICING THAT YOU WERE…_ NUDGING _ONE OF THE SOULS AS TO HIS CHOICE OF AFTERLIFE._

DID I TELL HIM WHERE TO GO? Death by Narrative Imperative tried not to grin. It wasn’t easy.

_YOU HAVE TOLD ME IN THE PAST THAT JUSTICE WAS NOT YOUR CONCERN. THAT PEOPLE GO WHEREVER THEY BELIEVE THEY ARE GOING. HAVE YOU GROWN TO CARE FOR HUMANS, AFTER ALL?_

OF COURSE NOT! I SERVE ONLY TO COLLECT THEIR SOULS, AS AN UNDERTAKER DISPOSES OF THEIR BODIES.

The Head Death adjusted the folds of his blue cloak. _HOW IS SARAH THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL DOING?_

SHE WAS ADOPTED BY A COUPLE OF WATCHMEN. THEY HAD BEEN LIVING TOGETHER FOR YEARS, BUT WERE UNABLE TO HAVE CHILDREN.

 _WELL, IF THEY WERE BOTH WATCH_ MEN…

A FIGURE OF SPEECH, MY LORD.

_I SEE._

ONE IS A TROLL, THE OTHER A DWARF. It hadn’t been in Britain, needless to say. It was likely to be a while yet before the Aurors’ Office round here tried to recruit centaurs, goblins, and house-elves – in spite of the fact that house-elves, as nobody paid attention to them, were the ideal undercover agents. Perhaps when exchange schemes started seconding trainee Aurors to Ankh-Morpork, that might change.

And yes, Death by Narrative Imperative _knew_ he wasn’t supposed to save her life, but – well, he hadn’t been doing his _regular_ job, the night when she was supposed to die from a combination of hypothermia, malnutrition and tuberculosis. And the same applied to young Sal, the one he’d given sand from his own lifetimer to save, while he had briefly been sacked from his job and living as a mortal. As for his adopted daughter and her husband – no, all right, he didn’t have any excuses there. 

ALL WHO WERE ON MY LIST TONIGHT, DIED TONIGHT, he said. AND THAT INCLUDED MY HAVING YET _ANOTHER_ NEAR-HARRY EXPERIENCE.

 _BUT YOU DID NOT STOP TO ARGUE WITH HARRY POTTER,_ the Head Death pointed out. _NOR WITH VOLDEMORT, OTHER THAN CONVINCING HIM THAT HE REALLY_ WAS _DEAD. YOU SPENT FAR LONGER WITH THIS OTHER ONE. WHY?_

BECAUSE HE KNEW, DEEP DOWN, THAT HE WAS NOT A MONSTER, said Death by Narrative Imperative. I NEEDED TIME TO MAKE SURE THAT HE REALISED THAT HE KNEW.

_I SEE._

MAY I GO HOME NOW? MY GRANDDAUGHTER WILL BE VISITING, NOW THAT TERM IS OVER. AND HER YOUNG MAN, OF COURSE.

_OF COURSE._

The Head Death watched his subordinate go. Really, he thought, a Death who had room for concepts in his skull like ‘home’ and ‘granddaughter’? It was no wonder he’d got round to ‘justice’ and ‘mercy’. Definitely gone native.

The Head Death resolved never to tell the fellow, to his skull, just how proud he was of him.


	3. Chapter 3

A line of figures stood in the pre-dawn darkness on the pier at the river mouth. Most of them seemed to be human, though it was too dim to distinguish friends from enemies, and either from strangers. Of course, Severus knew, there wasn’t much chance of anyone on either side seeing him as anything _but_ an enemy now. But then, it wasn’t as if anyone had actually thought of him as a friend, even before. He was just a convenient tool.

A woman up ahead of him in the queue exclaimed, ‘Oh, hello! What _are_ you, anyway? Some kind of extra-terrestrial?’

‘Of course not!’ snapped a goblin voice. ‘Can’t you recognise a goblin when you see one? You’ll be telling me next you’ve got no idea what a house-elf is! You witches and wizards think you own the world!’

‘Witches? How dare you? I’m a decent woman and I don’t have to listen to that sort of talk!’

‘Oh? So you won’t want to come on the boat with magic folk, eh?’ asked the goblin. ‘All the more room for us, eh, Ribby?’

‘I didn’t say that!’ said the woman hastily. ‘I just – hadn’t met a goblin or a, a house-elf before, but if you exist, you must be God’s creatures, and you’ve got as much right to be on the boat as I have. But I _won’t_ stand for being accused of witchcraft. I don’t even read horoscopes in the papers!’

At this point, a boat drew up alongside the pier. The angel who was driving it dropped his wings so as not to catch the breeze, and reached out a hand to catch hold of the side of the pier.

‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘Come aboard; I’ve got room for a dozen people – well, maybe thirteen, if one of the humans is willing to have the house-elf sit on their lap.’

At the head of the queue, the woman who had been arguing with the goblin stepped onto the boat, sat down, and spread out her skirt to make a seat for the elf Ribby. The goblin settled into the seat next to her, with the rest of the queue following. Severus, who was the last to board, found himself at the front of the boat, seated opposite the woman with the elf, and just behind the angel ferryman. The angel pushed away from the pier, opened one wing carefully angled to catch the breeze, so that the boat turned in a circle, and then spread out both, so that, as he sat with his back to the prow, facing the group of passengers, the wind blew him and the boat onwards. He never turned his head to see where he was going, but easily manoeuvred round any other users of the waterways, without their apparently even seeing that the angel-boat existed. Perhaps he was using some kind of super-sensory charm, or whatever the celestial equivalent was.

‘Now,’ he said, as bars of pink began to appear in the darkness of the sky, ‘do you all know where I’m taking you?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said the woman with the elf, not with a sense of confusion, but one who is confident that she can’t know. ‘We might be going to Heaven, or to Hell. I’ve done my best to live a good life, and it’s up to God to decide whether my best was good enough.’

‘I assure you, it wasn’t,’ said the angel. He paused to let this sink in, and then added, ‘But the good news is that you’re _not_ going to Hell, and, eventually, you _are_ all going to Heaven. But do you understand where I’m taking you right now?’

‘Purgatory?’ guessed a balding man with a dark, bushy beard.

‘That’s right, Martin; well done!’ said the angel. ‘And do you understand what you’re going there for?’

‘Punishment!’ squeaked Ribby the elf, cowering as she said it.

‘That’s a good try, Ribby,’ said the angel gently. ‘That’s what a lot of people think, isn’t it? But it’s not exactly right…’

‘Wrong answer! Bad elf! Bad Ribby!’ whimpered Ribby, smacking herself hard in the face.

‘Doreen, can you look after her?... Thank you,’ said the angel, as Doreen cuddled Ribby closer to her, holding the elf’s arms to her sides to stop her harming herself, while whispering soothingly into her huge, bat-wing ears. ‘Now, as I’ve said, this isn’t about punishment – and _especially_ you’re not allowed to punish yourself, Ribby. So does anyone know what it _is_ for?’

‘To atone for our sins,’ said Martin.

‘No. Believe me, God had already forgiven your sins thousands of years before you committed them. There is nothing you either can do, or need to do, to earn forgiveness.’

‘No, I know we’ve been _forgiven_ , but we still have to be punished,’ protested Martin. ‘Otherwise, if we’re not going to be punished for the bad things we’ve done, and rewarded for the good things, then the whole idea of good and evil is completely meaningless!’

‘No. When you realise that the reason for doing the right thing is because it _is_ right, not to earn reward or avoid punishment, is when goodness _does_ have meaning,’ said the angel.

‘But there has to be balance,’ protested Martin. ‘If we’ve done something wrong, we have to pay for it.’

‘Pay for it?’ repeated the angel silkily, in the tones of someone leading his hearers into a verbal trap. ‘Whom are you paying?’

‘God, of course,’ said Martin.

‘And what are you paying him in?’

‘Suffering.’

‘Interesting. So, do you believe that God is a sadist who derives pleasure from the suffering of those he loves?’

‘Well, no, of course not…’ mumbled Martin.

‘Then what do you think God does want, if not suffering? Anyone?’

Nobody seemed in a hurry to answer. Eventually, Severus, remembering the discussions he and Professor Dumbledore had had about Horcruxes, suggested, ‘Repentance?’

‘Well done,’ said the angel. ‘But what is repentance, exactly?’

‘Saying sorry,’ suggested Doreen.

‘Saying sorry and _meaning_ it,’ added a young girl further down the boat who didn’t look more than thirteen or fourteen at most, with a cheeky grin that suggested that she knew all about being ordered to apologise when you _didn’t_ mean it.

‘Sorry’s not good enough,’ muttered Martin. ‘There are some sins that just are completely unforgiveable.’

 _And I’ve committed them_. Admittedly, it wasn’t likely that Martin, who was almost certainly a Muggle, had ever heard of the _Avada Kedavra_ curse, but the angel presumably knew that Severus had used it, and God certainly knew. _So how can I not be heading for Hell? Or am I, after all?_ Phineas Nigellus had reported that Harry Potter had used the _Imperius_ curse during his hunt for Horcruxes, and the boy had certainly used _Cruciatus_ on Amycus Carrow. _So is HE heading for Hell as well? I promised to protect the little brat, until last year I thought Dumbledore WANTED me to protect him, and even if he was planning to have the kid sacrifice himself, Dumbledore presumably wanted to protect Potter’s soul even if he didn’t care about mine, NOW WHAT HAPPENS?_ Oh well, Severus reminded himself, at least he was good at freaking out quietly. Probably nobody would notice how hard his hands were gripping the woodwork of the sides of the boat.

‘It’s all right,’ said Doreen. ‘God’s justice won’t be defeated. If we’re the group who are saved, then the people whose sins are too bad to be forgiven, like practising witchcraft, couldn’t be here, would they? I’m sure _you_ haven’t done anything like that, have you, love?’ she murmured to Ribby, still cuddling her. She considered this, and added, ‘Well, I suppose magic is natural for goblins and – house-elves, was it? Maybe it’s only a sin for humans.’

 _I’m among enemies,_ Severus reminded himself. _Stupid enemies, at that. There’s no point in arguing about it, any more than there would be in shouting, “Support Harry Potter!” in the middle of a Death Eater meeting._

But the teenage girl who had spoken up before shouted, ‘Oh, yeah? When I got my acceptance letter to Hogwarts, my parents dragged me round to all the conversion therapists they could find, to try to “cast the devils out of me” and make a Muggle of me! They came up with all these neat little theories about how I’d got infected with demon possession when I’d had my ears pierced, or inherited it when my mum had a blood transfusion when she had her appendix out, or from my mum’s dad being a Freemason, or from my great-grandparents because they used to live in Golders Green so they were probably Jewish, or maybe it was my dad who was infected because he was a science fiction fan who liked playing Dungeons and Dragons! The _only_ explanation they didn’t consider is that maybe some people just are witches and wizards, and people should get used to it!’

‘Your parents had a more – _exotic_ approach to magic than my father,’ remarked Severus. ‘He just assumed that hitting me and shouting at me and at my mother would be enough to cure me.’

The girl looked intently at him in the pre-dawn greyness. ‘Did you get that thing where the anger explodes out of you and hurts people?’

‘No,’ said Severus. ‘But then, it helped that I knew what I was. I knew that my mother was a witch, and I knew that when I was eleven I was going to Hogwarts and that my father couldn’t get at me there. In the meantime – he was mostly at work or at the pub, until he lost his job, and then he was either at the pub or passed out at home, so it wasn’t too hard to keep out of his way. If he was at home and conscious, I could always go down to the park.’

‘My parents weren’t like that,’ said the girl, sniffling slightly. (Magic wasn’t the only thing she couldn’t control, evidently.) ‘They never hit me, and they didn’t drink much, and when my dad had had a few glasses of wine, he just talked more. He used to tell stories. But – but sometimes I wished they _were_ abusive, so that I could accept that they were my enemies and just forgive them. As it was, I – I didn’t want to hurt them, so I locked myself in my room so that if I went weird I could only hurt myself, and – and I died.’

‘How old are you?’ Severus asked.

‘Fourteen.’

That was impressive in itself. Most children in her position died by the age of ten.

‘So,’ said Severus, turning back to Doreen. ‘This girl died because her parents’ ignorance reduced her to the situation of an unmedicated werewolf, and she doesn’t believe they abused her because they didn’t hit her. If you think she’s cut off from salvation because she happened to be born a witch, might I ask where you think _they_ deserve to go?’

‘No!’ shouted the girl, horrified. ‘Don’t send them to Hell! It’s not their fault! They just didn’t understand!’

‘Then maybe you need to forgive them for not trying to understand,’ said the angel.

‘Y-yeah, I s’pose,’ said the girl. ‘Am I allowed to pray for them, when I’m here?’

‘Of course,’ said the angel.

Severus didn’t say anything. He wasn’t clear about what ‘forgive’ meant. In his experience, if you did something that made people angry with you, and you were sorry and apologised, then either they slammed the door in your face and never spoke to you again, or, if you could prove that you were useful to them, they would tolerate having you around but never quite trust you.

‘Are you thinking that you can’t bring yourself to forgive your enemies?’ the angel asked him.

‘I was wondering why I’d want to.’

‘Put it like this,’ said the angel. ‘If your father were still alive, and you had the authority to send him to Azkaban for the rest of his life, would you do it?’

Severus wondered if he would. He remembered taunting Sirius Black with the threat of being sent back to Azkaban and subjected to the Dementor’s Kiss. He remembered being held in Azkaban, awaiting trial, and the horrible feeling when a Dementor passed by, and being surprised that they had the power to make him feel any more wretched than he already did, and wishing he could cast a Patronus in here, and hating himself for even thinking of that, because his Patronus had the same form as Lily’s, and it was sacrilegious even to think of her when it was his fault she’d died…

‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘A Muggle prison, maybe. But not Azkaban.’

‘Well,’ said the angel, ‘given that Hell is for all eternity, not just for a human lifespan, and that God loves your father a lot more than you do, perhaps you can understand why God forgives.’ He paused to let this sink in, and then added, ‘On the other hand, God is angrier than you are about the times when people have ill-treated you or exploited you, because God loves _you_ more than you love yourself, too.’ He fell silent again, stretching his wings a little further to catch the breeze.

Severus thought, _When he talks about love like this, he sounds like Dumbledore_. And then, _No. He’s the sort of person Dumbledore would like to be, and maybe thinks he is, or maybe hates himself for not being._

He wondered where Dumbledore was now. Presumably he _had_ gone on – or at least, his portrait-self had seemed to think that it was not the real Albus Dumbledore, nor a trapped soul-fragment like a Horcrux, but just a recording of his personality. In which case, was he in Purgatory, or had he reached Heaven by now, or horrible thought – was he encased in flame among the Counsellors of Fraud? What if Severus had not only physically killed him, but condemned him to be tortured for ever?

No. It was no good thinking like that. But, if they did meet again – would meeting Dumbledore, whom he had personally killed but only because Dumbledore had insisted on it, be worse than meeting Lily again, whose death he had caused without meaning to? _And Dumbledore promised to protect her, and didn’t_ , growled a rebellious voice in the back of his brain. _He borrowed that Invisibility Cloak that might have protected her. Maybe he did it on purpose, so that you’d feel guilty enough to…_

_NO! This is stupid, paranoid thinking! He’s an ex-would-be-Dark-Lord who’s trying to be good, just as you’re an ex-Death-Eater trying to be good._

_Or maybe he isn’t. Maybe he’s lied about EVERYTHING, and the message you passed on to Lily’s son that he needed to die in order to defeat Voldemort was just one more subterfuge, and you’ve sent a teenage boy to his death for nothing…_

No. He needed to put a brick wall in front of that train of thought. After all, he’d know soon enough, one way or another. Even without thinking about Dumbledore, there were plenty more people he would have to face seeing again. Victims of the Death Eaters who had pleaded with him to rescue them, like Charity Burbage, for example.

He tried to think whether there was anyone he _was_ looking forward to seeing. Lily, of course – but it wasn’t as though she’d be rushing to meet him, as if they were still friends, still children and full of hope. Maybe, like the heroine in the book, she’d be waiting at the top of the mountain to tell him off for screwing up practically everything in his entire life, until he cried. And then, perhaps, like the heroine in the book, she would forgive him – but then again, remembering Lily Evans as the girl he had been at school with, and not as a godlike heroine, quite probably she wouldn’t.

On the other hand, probably Regulus would be there. Even if he’d already completed his journey to Heaven, he might be willing to retrace his steps to guide Severus through it. It would be good to see him again.

‘I should explain,’ said the angel, ‘that when we land, most of you probably won’t immediately see all the people you knew in your earthly lives, even if they were people who died at the same time as you. Now, you don’t need to assume that this means they were all either perfect or so arrogant that they won’t admit that they’ve done anything wrong. It’s partly that time works differently here from the way it does on Earth, but, more importantly, you’re probably not ready to cope with meeting all the people you need to resolve damaged relationships with, all at once. But I promise that you’ll meet each of them at the right time.

‘Incidentally,’ he added, ‘I asked earlier what “repent” means. Has anyone had any further thoughts?’

Severus wondered. He had often felt irritated that Latin had been dropped as a compulsory subject at Hogwarts, so that most pupils couldn’t guess from the names of spells what they might do. But in this case – he cast his mind back – most dictionaries seemed coy about where the word ‘repent’ came from, beyond saying that it came from Latin, but it seemed to derive from _poena_ , punishment, and to be related to pain, punish, punch, and pine. They didn’t suggest that it was anything to do with re-thinking your life. But perhaps etymology only told you where a word had come from, not where it was going. Especially when it was trying to do the work of a Greek word that meant changing your mind.

‘I imagine,’ he said, ‘that it means learning what we didn’t learn in our Earthly lives about how we should be living. And the process probably involves finding out that most of the things we thought we had learned were wrong.’

‘ _Excellent!_ ’ said the angel, in tones that implied that he would have added, ‘Ten House Points to Slytherin!’ if there had been any point. ‘Some of you may have been told that you were evil and nothing but evil, and couldn’t desire anything except evil,’ he went on. ‘It wasn’t true. All of you were born with the instinct to seek good, just as a plant is born with the instinct to seek light. But as you grew up, you were bombarded with confused messages, both from your own senses and from the people around you, about what was good or bad. People tried to reduce it to simple rules that a child could remember, and when you noticed that the rules didn’t always fit with one another, you either tried to force your life to follow them anyway, or you gave up on them, or, if you were wise, you tried to understand what the _real_ rules were that were the reason for the rules your parents and teachers had told you. Everyone who passes through life has to learn all this…’

‘Even Jesus?’ asked the young witch. Doreen impatiently shushed her, but the angel nodded seriously.

‘Even Jesus,’ he said firmly. ‘He wasn’t born knowing all the answers, any more than you were. And he _certainly_ knows how you felt, being told off by people who didn’t understand and just wanted you to be normal.

‘Sometimes, people complete their journey to Heaven in their lifetime,’ he continued. ‘But all of you came up against barriers of one sort or another that prevented you from developing fully into the people you needed to be, and so there’s something more you need to learn before you can become people who are able to appreciate Heaven.

‘Incidentally, do you know what happens when you’ve completed your journey and reach Heaven? Anyone? Severus?’

‘We discover that there’s infinitely more to learn that we hadn’t even begun to realise we didn’t understand?’

‘ _Exactly!_ ’ said the angel, looking, for a moment, very like Dumbledore at his most irritating. Most of the passengers on the boat groaned in tones ranging from despairing to ruefully amused at themselves. They sounded exactly like a class first being confronted with the horrifying truth that, even if they scored Outstanding in their OWL Potions exam, they would have to learn even more about potion-making to pass their NEWTs, and that, if they wanted to go onto a career in potion-brewing, they would need to serve an apprenticeship in which they would have to learn still more.

It was like being eleven and going away to Hogwarts for the first time, all over again. And Heaven would be like that, too. Except that _this_ time, presumably nobody was allowed to bully him or try to murder him.

It could only be an improvement.


	4. Chapter 4

It was nearly dawn in another country when the boat reached its destination. It was still dark enough to see the Southern Cross and the Southern Triangle, Centaurus, and the Phoenix: all constellations Severus had never seen except in photographs. The four stars of the Southern Cross represented Courage, Justice, Wisdom, and Self-Control, though in this place it was unlikely that people were sorted into groups according to which of these qualities they possessed or aspired to. They would need all four to climb the mountain that loomed ahead of them as the sky lightened.

The boat pulled up onto the shore, and the angel stepped out and held onto it while its passengers climbed out. When everyone had disembarked, he waved a wing to gesture to a colleague to take the boat on the next trip, while he shepherded his group onto the beach.

An old man who had been watching nearby made his way stiffly down to meet the newcomers. His long white hair, plaited into two braids, fell forward on his chest to mingle with the whiteness of his beard and the whiteness of his toga. Only around his stomach was the material torn and stained with blood.

Though he was as white-bearded as Dumbledore, there was nothing twinkly-eyed about this one. In the starlight, the new arrivals could see him glaring at them, and at the angel.

‘Do you mean to tell me _this_ rabble are allowed in?’ he demanded. ‘Not just non-Christians, but non-humans and witches? I swear the entry requirements are getting laxer every year!’

‘More than when you came here, Marcus?’ enquired the angel with a smile. ‘You aren’t a Christian yourself – and if you’re going to be legalistic, many people consider suicide a sin.’

‘I’m glad I did it rather than live under a dictator!’ retorted the man. ‘ _And_ it took me two tries, thanks to bloody doctors trying to save my life!’

‘Understood,’ said the angel. ‘And you should know that this wizard here gave his life in fighting to rid the world of another dictator.’

The man called Marcus considered this for some time, and eventually held out his hand to shake Severus’s. ‘Good for you, boy,’ he said gruffly. ‘Did you succeed?’

‘I don’t know, yet. I hope so.’ If Potter even bothered to look at the memories Severus had given him, and realised he needed to sacrifice himself – and if he actually did sacrifice himself – and if that really _would_ defeat Voldemort, and wasn’t just another subterfuge.

‘I didn’t. But it was worth it for trying, anyway. Pleased to meet you. Marcus Portius Cato.’

‘Severus Snape.’

‘Welcome to Purgatory. You’d better get a move on, now – there’ll be boatloads more people arriving, and you can’t all doss around at the foot of the mountain.’

‘By the way, Marcus,’ said the angel, ‘the offer’s still open for you to begin your journey, as soon as you feel ready. The same condition applies as before: you and Publius Vergilius Maro have to make the journey together.’

‘That Imperialist lickspittle poet? I’d rather go back to the Ninth Circle!’

‘Hmm. When you were acquitted of treason and transferred from the lower Hell to Limbo, it was Publius who came down there to escort you back, wasn’t it?’

‘It was. And why _he_ wasn’t condemned to the Eighth Circle as a flatterer, I can’t imagine.’

‘No, you can’t, can you?’ said the angel. ‘But all the same – did Publius insult _you_ for opposing Caesar’s rule?’

‘Well – no,’ Cato admitted. ‘I suppose he’s not that bad, for an Imperialist.’

‘And a few years later, when you were freed to come here and he wasn’t, did he complain?’

‘No. He said they’d want a good Roman to keep an eye on a place like this, and he couldn’t think of anyone better qualified than me. Mealy-mouthed little twit! Anyway, he _did_ come through on a visit, about seven hundred years ago, the time they let that _living_ man in on a tour.’

‘Exactly. So he knows the way up the mountain. He’d be happy to accompany you to Heaven, if you’d like to have a companion from your own time and culture.’

‘Yes, but it’s _him!_ ’ groaned Cato.

Severus realised that, while he had been listening to this conversation, the other travellers had all dispersed, and all fallen into conversation with old friends or relatives, or with people they had always wanted to meet (except Ribby the elf, who had decided to stay with Doreen). It really _was_ just like starting school – and realising that everyone else there seemed to be either a Pure-blood who had grown up immersed in the wizarding world and was surrounded by cousins and family friends, or else so naturally sociable and likeable that they could make a new Best Friend Forever just by stepping onto Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters. 

At least the first time round, getting on the Hogwarts Express for the first time, he’d had Lily’s company – at least once Lily had stopped being in a bad mood after quarrelling with that ghastly sister of hers, just because Petunia had found out that Lily and Severus had been reading her letter from Professor Dumbledore…

Come to think of it, Severus realised, if _he’d_ had a sister who used to sneak into his room with her friends when he was a teenager, how would he have felt if they’d been poking into all his stuff? Not just the spells he’d created or improved, but his diary and his attempts at poetry and the lists of cool nicknames he’d tried inventing for himself to make up for the things everyone else called him? 

He remembered how furious he had been when he had caught Harry Potter sneaking a look at one of the most painful, humiliating memories of his life. But, when he looked back, he realised that the look on the little brat’s face hadn’t been jeering, but horrified. Severus realised now that, if he had read Potter’s thoughts at that moment (it wasn’t as though the lazy sod had made any effort at learning to shield them), they would have read, not, ‘Hah! Now I know what a loser you were, and you can’t frighten me!’ but, ‘Wait, my dad was a git like my cousin Dudley? And this is the man I’ve been aspiring to be like?’

It dawned on him that the boy probably hadn’t had any idea what sort of memories he expected to find in the Pensieve. He wasn’t malevolent, just curious and totally disrespectful of anyone else’s privacy, just as Severus and Lily had been. It was part of being a child.

Was this why Purgatory was such a dreaded place, then? Because you suddenly realised what life looked like from everyone else’s point of view?

On the whole, maybe it wasn’t so bad to realise that he had been neither more nor less obnoxious than most of the other people he knew, apart from a few total vermin like…

He stared incredulously for a moment, and then hissed to the angel, ‘What the Hell is _he_ doing here?’

The angel followed his gaze to the small, one-handed man sitting hunched over, avoiding the gaze of everyone around him. ‘Waiting to climb the mountain, presumably,’ he said.

‘I mean _why_ was he allowed in?’

‘For the same reason as anyone else. It might be a good idea to say hello to him, you know.’

Coming from an angel, this was clearly an instruction, not a suggestion. _The first person whom I am expected to greet as an old friend has to be HIM. WHY? ANYONE else would be better. Even anyone else from that vicious pack…_

_Yes, but if it HAD been any of the others, you wouldn’t have thought so, would you? You’d have been thinking, ‘Aaargh, not HIM, I still have nightmares about him!’ or, ‘Ugh, not HIM, he’s a psychopath who tried to feed me to a werewolf and he STILL can’t understand why there was anything wrong with that!’ or ‘Oh, please, not HIM, he tormented me throughout my time at school AND married the woman I loved!’ Any of them would seem like the worst possible outcome. So just get it over with._

Severus strode over to the smaller man until his shadow blotted out the rising sun. ‘Wormtail,’ he drawled. ‘You finally decided to get rid of that trinket, did you? Probably the first sensible decision you’ve ever made.’

‘Trin…?’ Wormtail glanced down at the stump of his wrist. ‘Oh, that. Yes.’

As he got to his feet and turned to face the taller wizard, Severus noticed that his face looked somehow different: calmer and more relaxed than Severus had ever seen him. The Dark Mark tattoo above his stump had vanished (Severus resisted the temptation to roll up his sleeve to see if his own had, too), and the bruise-marks around his throat, where his magical hand had strangled him, shone golden, like the scars of a saintly martyr.

_Wormtail, a martyr? Hah!_

_But then, he’s a Gryffindor, isn’t he? They always assume that whatever they’re doing is Good, because it’s them doing it._ Betraying a friend to the Dark Lord (not by accident as Severus had, but deliberately), murdering a streetful of Muggles just because they happened to be there, and framing another friend for the murders… if you were a Gryffindor, all was forgiven.

‘ _Everyone’s_ sins are forgiven,’ the angel pointed out. ‘Those who climb the mountain are the ones who need to understand more of what the sins they’ve been forgiven for actually were. But those who refuse to climb it because they don’t want to find out are no less forgiven.’

‘I’m not _refusing_ , exactly,’ said Wormtail, with a trace of his usual whininess in his voice. ‘It’s just…’ He looked toward surrounding the mountain. It was cut into terraces, separated by steep expanses of sheer cliff. There was a very narrow, barely visible ‘path’ up to the first terrace, consisting of little more than bumps in the rock that might serve as hand- or footholds. To an experienced climber, it might perhaps have looked like a fun challenge. To a small, timid, out-of-condition, one-handed man, it was out of the question.

‘I suppose you’ve never learnt to fly?’ Severus asked.

‘Y-you mean without a broom?’

‘Do you _see_ any brooms around here?’

‘Uh, no.’

‘Well, then.’

‘N-no, I haven’t. The Dark Lord never saw fit to teach me…’

‘In the first place, we don’t have to call him that any more. He isn’t coming here – is he?’ Severus added, turning to the angel. After all, considering how willing they were to let Death Eaters in, anything was possible.

‘I promise you, Lord Voldemort will never be allowed in here,’ the angel said. He paused for a moment, and then added, ‘If Tom Riddle is willing to give up being Lord Voldemort, he will be very welcome, of course.’

‘Secondly, he didn’t teach me how to fly, either, and I took good care not to tell him that I already knew how to fly,’ Severus continued. Lily had taught him how, when they were twelve and he had been worried that the next time Sirius Black and James Potter decided it would be funny to push him out of the Astronomy Tower window, Lupin might not try to stop them. Lily had taught herself to fly when she was nine, not because she was frightened of anything, but just because it was fun. Her son might have inherited her natural gift for it, even if he’d forgotten it once he was allowed to play with broomsticks. In that frustrating year of trying to teach the boy Occlumency, Severus remembered coming across a memory of eight-year-old Harry finding himself on top of a roof, safely out of the way of his cousin and his gang, and feeling confused about how he had got there.

Come to think of it, Severus realised, if he had actually _thought_ about some of the memories he’d uncovered, instead of just being annoyed that the boy wasn’t making more effort to learn to block him, he might have allowed himself to feel some sympathy. He ought to have accepted that he had made a lot of wrong assumptions, and that Potter Junior wasn’t simply a spoilt, arrogant duplicate of Potter Senior with Lily’s scornful eyes. Really, he was just another wizard kid who’d grown up in a Muggle town with a family who couldn’t stand him, and who had learned to be spiky and insolent to grown-ups because it was that or turn into a frightened ball of self-doubt like Neville Longbottom.

‘If you can’t manage the climb, I can levitate you to the first level,’ he found himself saying, before he had time to wonder why he bothered. ‘And you needn’t worry that I’m going to turn you upside down and strip your clothes off. I have no desire to see what you look like naked.’

‘You haven’t even got a wand!’ Wormtail pointed out.

‘I don’t need one.’ The two areas of magic that Severus had always found most fascinating were almost on opposite edges of the curriculum: potion-making, which worked according to logical rules, like Muggle science only with magic; and the magic that came from the wizard’s mind and will, for which speaking, singing or thinking words was only a tool to focus the will. Compared with those, all the spells that just involved waving sticks and saying words in garbled Latin seemed like conjuring tricks.

‘In fact, a wand wouldn’t be any use here,’ said the angel.

‘We _are_ wizards, you know!’ said Wormtail indignantly.

‘You _were_ wizards. Just as some people here were archbishops, or judges, or cabinet ministers. Here, the distinctions between wizard and Muggle, Pure-blood and Muggle-born, Gryffindor and Slytherin, no longer exist. People don’t even have nationalities or surnames here. You are simply Severus and Peter.’

‘So I can’t do magic?’ asked Wormtail – or rather, Peter-the-no-longer-Animagus.

‘Not here.’

‘Will I be able to in Heaven?’

‘What everyone can do in Heaven is so far beyond what anyone can do on Earth that I won’t try to explain it to you now. You’ll see when you get there.’

‘But how am I supposed to get there if I can’t climb?’

‘You do what anyone else would have to do when faced with a problem they can’t solve. You pray. And, as I expect neither of you has much experience of praying, I’ll just explain: it’s the opposite of magic. Instead of focusing on willing what you want until it happens, you focus on asking God to do whatever it is best should happen.’

Severus closed his eyes to concentrate on thinking: _God, you know I hate Wormt- Peter, but I know that you wouldn’t have allowed him here unless you could see something in him that is worth redeeming. So, if you are willing to let his hand regrow, or give him enough agility to manage the climb one-handed, or give me the ability to do magic, or whatever is necessary, please will you do it? Amen._

‘I think your prayers are answered,’ the angel said. Severus opened his eyes and saw that Peter was gone. Following the angel’s pointing arm, he could see the man huddling against the cliff-face on not the first but the second up of the seven terraces before you reached the peak.

Of course – the first level was dedicated to the sin of pride, wasn’t it? And a man with so little self-respect that he had spent over a decade in rat-form, so that he could enjoy the safety of being a pet instead of facing imprisonment for his crimes, could hardly be accused of _that_.

‘Out of interest,’ he asked the angel, ‘what would have happened if I hadn’t prayed?’

‘Oh, we’d probably have kept him here for a few hundred years to think over where he went wrong. That’s what we usually do, with people who didn’t repent until the last minute.’

‘Do you mean when they realise they’re dying and worry that there might be a God, or when they realise that following the Dark wizard who is currently strangling them wasn’t such a good idea?’

‘Well, in Peter’s case it was more the other way round. You did know that his magical hand throttled him because he refused to kill Harry Potter, don’t you?’

This was one of various assorted rumours that had been floating around, and at the time Severus had been too busy with other things to worry about which version was correct. ‘And refusing to murder in cold blood a teenage boy who had previously saved his life is enough to atone for all the murders he did commit?’ he said.

‘No, of course not. Good deeds exist for their own sake; they don’t counterbalance bad deeds, any more than the way that you and Albus Dumbledore devoted your adult lives to fighting against evil, and died because of it, makes up for the mistakes either of you made when you were young and naïve. Or any more than a woman’s giving her life to save her child makes up for rejecting a friend who loved her.’

‘Don’t you…’ Severus began angrily, but the angel interrupted him with a wave of a wing.

‘It’s best to admit it. You’re a romantic; your imagination has spaces for the archetypes of the Lady and the Mentor, and so, if the people you have assigned those roles to are harsh and unforgiving, you assume that you don’t deserve forgiveness. But here, you need to learn that no-one deserves forgiveness, and everyone is forgiven. And in the meantime, Peter is up on the second level, surrounded by nobody he knows.’

‘Is that the one where people’s eyes are sewn shut, and the ones further off from the rock-face have to hold onto the ones who are touching it, to avoid falling off the cliff-edge?’ In which case, the other people up there needed to be warned that Peter Pettigrew was a treacherous little backstabber who needed to be placed on the outermost side, so that people weren’t depending on him for their safety.

‘We’ll make sure he doesn’t pose a threat to anyone,’ said the angel. ‘But it isn’t easy for an untrustworthy person to trust others with his safety, either. Especially a Pure-blood who has scarcely any experience of Muggles, and finds himself outside his wizarding enclave in a world where Muggles outnumber wizards by ten thousand to one.’

‘Do you expect me to feel sorry for him?’

‘Not if you can’t manage it. But I do ask you to consider what you’d do if it were someone you cared about – Draco, for example – up there.’

Draco wasn’t particularly bloodthirsty, but, remembering his confused attempts at assassination in the sixth year, it was all too easy to imagine him with a kill-list as long as Peter Pettigrew’s, probably consisting mainly of random bystanders he had killed by accident. And he wouldn’t cope well with isolation, either – although Draco tended to recruit henchmen who were too dim to argue with him, where Peter Pettigrew had only ever aspired to be the sidekick of the biggest bully available, starting with James Potter and Sirius Black.

_And how was that different from the way you started hanging around with Avery and Mulciber?_

‘If Draco were up there and lonely, I’d want to be with him,’ Severus said. ‘But I don’t imagine that Peter Pettigrew would relish my presence any more than I would his.’

‘He doesn’t like you, certainly. But at the moment, you’re the only person he can be reasonably sure he can trust.’

‘Trust me? Why? No-one else does.’

‘Because when he was assigned to you as an assistant, you may have annoyed him by insulting him in front of visitors and not giving him anything more interesting to do than housework, but you didn’t take advantage of your authority to hurt him, did you? You may not have treated him with any more respect than you’d show a house-elf, but – you’re not the sort of person who’d mistreat house-elves, either.’

‘Are you accusing me of being a nice person?’

‘No. Just a more decent person than Peter. Which is why he needs you to teach him.’

‘Why are we even discussing this?’ Severus asked. ‘I haven’t served my time on the first level yet. _He_ may not need to be purged of the sin of pride, but I do. Or doesn’t my soul matter as much as a Gryffindor’s?’ He realised that he probably sounded as whiny as Pettigrew now, but he was past caring.

‘Believe me, you matter immeasurably,’ said the angel. ‘You don’t ever need to fear again that you are insignificant: just a child caught between warring parents, just a geeky teenager wishing he knew how to impress the girl he loves, just a pawn in an ever-more-complex game of subterfuge. You are loved by God: loved so much that if you were the only person who needed saving, he would give everything to save you alone. Don’t ever forget that. And don’t forget that everyone else here is loved to the same degree. Including Peter. I can take you to him now, if you’re ready?’

So this was what happened in Purgatory? You didn’t get a mentor, you got commandeered to be a mentor to someone so odious that he made you realise how nice by comparison all the people you’d thought you hated when you were alive were?

Yes. It _would_ be, wouldn’t it? Hell wasn’t simply other people; Hell was being lonely in a crowd. Hell was where, even when you were with people who had been your best friends when you were alive, both you and they had lost all the qualities that enabled you to put up with each other. So, conversely, Heaven must be where, even when you were with the people you had hated when you were alive, both you and they had grown up into the people God had created you to be, and you could see how much there was in them to love, just as God loved them. So Purgatory had to be the process of changing from one to the other. And it was more straightforward to start with an enemy than with someone you wanted to idealise.

‘Yes. I’m ready.’


End file.
